July 13, 2007

Most cited younger law professors: Eugene Volokh has the demographic numbers on the top 50 most-cited law school professors who entered teaching within the last 15 years:

- Only 12% are women, and none are in the top 44%.

- One third of those 12% belong to a lesbian legal organization.

Now, looking at ethnicity (across both sexes)

- 38% of the top 50 are ethnically Jewish (as well as 45% of citations to members of the Top 50)

- 14% are East Asians (and 3 of those 7 are in Critical Race Theory)

- 10% are South Asians (1 of 5 is in "Business and Race")

- 4% are blacks (one of two is in Critical Race Theory -- e.g., Paul Butler's Stanford Law Review article "Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment," while the other, Tracey Meares, is more of an empirical criminologist).

- Volokh says 30% are white gentiles, although it looks like 32% on his spreadsheet.

By the way, Number 28 on the list of top younger law school professors, Ronald J. Mann, is my old College Bowl teammate from Rice U. Glad to see that somebody I went to school with is still on a list of "younger" anythings ... although Ronald entered Rice age 16, so that's part of it. In high school, Ronald was the top Latin Quiz Bowl player in the country, so he was our main man on anything up through 476 A.D. After that, things were a little hazy for him, at least up until Zeppelin's first album.

37 comments:

Always nice to be reminded how stupid we white gentiles are compared to Hindus, Chinamen and Jews. It's a wonder we ever learned to walk upright without them.

Honestly, I can't stand school. I am a white, male gentile and I found it to be the most oppressive and frustrating exercise in ritualized dishonesty I have ever been subjected to. Even so, seeing these figures from a father's perspective is pretty depressing.

Volokh seems to think it's all fine and dandy (of course he does). Why, it's a "meritocracy", especially when you're speaking from the mountaintop.

I looked up Volokh and found him arguing against banning discrimination based on political views because, as he argues, one would then not be allowed to discriminate against racists.

Here's an example:

"This also applies outside personal life. Not wanting to be served dinner by a waiter who's black is reprehensible. Not wanting to be served dinner by a waiter who's a Klansman, and who likely hates you or your friends because you're black is, I think, understandable and proper. Decent magazine publishers ought not refuse to carry columns by Asians or by Jews. But they may properly refuse to carry not just Nazi propaganda, but also seemingly non-Nazi op-eds by Nazis. The publishers are under no moral obligation, and should be under no legal obligation, to help buttress Nazi commentators' public standing."

Well, who's a "racist" or a "nazi" and can therefore be legitimately denied a job? According to some professors, all whites are racist. My local school district even said as much in an official statement. And didn't Brimelow get fired for "racist" writings?

As for nazis, well, how many people are currently members of the NSDAP? How many people get called "Nazi"? And how about KKK members vs. people accused of being klansmen? See the problem? Personally, I think the word nazi is just the new n----r, and reflects the racial reversal of status in modern America. Again, I think Volokh is happy with this situation.

Actually, Volokh is not so sophisticated that his intentions are hard to discern. He is so obviously ethnocentric and biased that it gives me cause to worry about whether my children will be treated even worse than white gentiles are now by academic overlords.

Most likely they'll just be shut out of universities by then for being inherently racist and retarded as white Christians.

I used to go to conferences with a lot of Israelis. I was a lawyer and when one Israeli found out he said his brother studied law in both Israel and the US.

He thene told me that his brother thought that US law was much more interesting than Israeli law and that he enjoyed US law more. The man thought this was a shocking thing for his brother to say, and he thought I would be surprised to hear it as well.

Why is US law more interesting?

Well, one thought is that is it a lot easier to "experiment" with the latest and greatest legal theory when you are one step removed from the culture. A Jewish legal scholar might(!) not feel the same cultural ownership in the US that he feels for Israel. (Remember Frum's comment.)

In Israel I am sure the desire for "radical" legal theories on the part of Jewish legal scholars just doesn't have the same attraction. It is much more exciting to find new legal rights for blacks or criminal in the states than for Palestinians in Israel, I have no doubt. Does anyone doubt that Alan Dershowitz would not have come to the conclusion that torture should be legal if any other country than Israel was using it?

I'm not sure if people are aware of how ruthlessly competitive that world is. Making it as an academic in the legal field is no joke. Roughly 50% of getting into law school is the LSAT, which is basically an IQ test. It is graded on a harsh curve. In law school there is blind grading and grades are strictly curved. Law school is not like undergrad where anyone can potentially get a 4.0. There is no stumbling into success.

To make it in academia, you have to be a star at a top school and law is stratified like almost no other field. When I say a top school, I mean that the number one school produces more professors than numbers two and three combined and that it drops off dramatically after the top four (Yale/Harvard/Stanford/Chicago). If you make it from a school that's merely in the top 10, you are an anomaly.

On another note, is there any truly elite intellectual field in which WASPs are not a minority? The interesting point being that this must have occurred in the last 50 years or so. When Noam Chomsky has been accused of being a self-hating Jew or whatever, he'll sometimes point out that he lived through some anti-Semitism and that it was still lingering around Harvard when he was there in the 50s, but that it is simply no longer relevant in our culture. The good old boys paradigm at elite universities was very real. However, it was simply wiped out in favor of meritocracy in about 30 years or so, which is pretty impressive.

In philosophy of the mind (the heavyweight arena of contemporary philosophy), you have Dennett, Searle, Chalmers, McGinn, Van Gelder and others who I assume are gentiles. Then you have Chomsky, Fodor, Kripke and other brilliant Jews (in terms of sheer genius Chomsky and Kripke are difficult to match). Hilary Putnam sounds like a name that could have been at Harvard in any century, but I thought I remembered he knew Chomsky back in their high school days which suggests to me he was part of a then small Jewish community in Philadelphia.

Most successful White Gentile attorneys work in white shoe law firms. They're not nebishes who'll settle for $150,000 for a "life of the mind". They'd rather make a million as a partner and partners are generally sales people more than great thinkers.

I wonder how many of the citations of black-authored works are on a race-specific topic (racial disparties in the death penalty, etc.), versus a more general nature where race is rarely a factor (contract or tax law, for example). And, further, how many blacks were cited by non-blacks?

As the Duke professorate showed us last year, black academia, even at elite institutions has become pretty much an ivory ghetto.

Chomsky is not that smart. He's had one major theory in his field, which Wade tears apart from newer work in linguistics. Simply put Chomsky's theories don't hold up to real world evidence (on how language forms). The case of the deaf Bedouins in Israel rebuts his theories.

As for Dershowitz, he's endorsed some sort of "torture warrants" for the US as well. He's hardly Israeli centric, that follows in the footsteps of what the Europeans have done to combat various forms of terrorism since the late 1870's. First the Anarchists, then the Communists/Nazis before the War, after the War the OAS and later Red Brigades/IRA/Baader-Meinhof along with gazillion Palestinian and Muslim terrorists.

People forget that Algerian terrorists were blowing up the Metro in Paris with regularity in the 80's and early 90's. Suppressed with ruthlessness backed by some fairly major changes in the law.

The bottom line is that the government's legitimacy rests on it's ability to provide first and foremost public safety. If it can't assure ordinary people they won't be blown apart on the way to work in some spectacular another Government in another form will be found. So laws and legal frameworks change. In France for example it's legal (after the response to the Algerian bombing campaign) to hold suspected terrorists without charges or trial for up to a year incommunicado. A magistrate (who also is the investigator under their system) must sign off on that but it's a formality.

Our current legal framework can't handle the continued prospect of Muslims here or coming into this country with various means of mass destruction. In 1993 the objective was to topple one tower into another at the WTC to kill 50,000 people. Given that new fatwas have been issued over "Evan Almighty" (Muslims are "enraged" that Morgan Freeman played God, and that the movie was a comedy) this isn't going to stop anytime soon.

If Morgan Freeman enrages Muslims, that's a recipe for conflict. Conflict with easy means to kill thousands of people at any time. So yes our legal framework will change under this pressure.

Just like it did under the forces of consumerism, social and personal mobility and the Cold War after 1945. Brown vs. Board of Education is only understandable in the point that wealthy whites would not be sending their kids to integrated schools, and found segregation morally and status-wise distasteful. [My cynical take.]

Instead of expecting your children to fail academically and coming up with excuses for that ahead of time, why not put some effort into helping them succeed? Go buy them Hooked On Phonics, find someone in your town who can teach them them to play piano or a foreign language. Get a book about chess and a chess set and teach your kids the basics. It's never easier for them to learn than when they are children -- take advantage of that, and be creative about it.

Beats teaching your kids to resent those who do well in school, no? You might as well adopt a black kid if you are going to do that.

Not that the comment was relevant to the post, but that of the above anon is retarded. He knows nothing about linguistics, to be frank. (I majored in linguistics, so I know more than what I've gleaned from a few newspaper articles.)

Chomsky's main contribution was not a vague idea of Universal Grammar (that goes back to Descartes and Von Humboldt). He brought linguistics back from the Behaviorist wastelands, invented modern syntactic theory, co-invented modern phonological theory (with Morris Halle), and invented the Chomsky Hierarchy of formal languages in computer science. The one major area of theoretical linguistics that he didn't pioneer is semantics -- that was mostly due to Richard Montague.

Nothing stands up in its entirety, since it takes time to refine ideas. Nick Wade is a good reporter, but hasn't refuted anything, as he doesn't write academic articles. To have invented what Chomsky did mostly from nothing is an impressive feat of intelligence and creativity.

(Sorry for the length, but the commenter is obviously angry with Chomsky's political views, and that's fine, but I won't tolerate it when it spills over into lazy, harebrained "criticism" of important scientific theories.)

I guess the overall high IQ of East Asians cannot fully compensate for their unexceptional verbal IQ, so half of them get in through the back door labeled "Critical Race Theory."

Are there any notable Jews in CRT? How about non-Jewish whites?

Daveg,

Well, one thought is that is it a lot easier to "experiment" with the latest and greatest legal theory when you are one step removed from the culture. A Jewish legal scholar might(!) not feel the same cultural ownership in the US that he feels for Israel. (Remember Frum's comment.)

Yeah, I grow weary of those Jews who seem to feel experimentalism is OK for the United States, just not for the Holy Land. Can't they just get out and move to Israel if that's the way they feel?

anonymous,

I don't think Chomsky is a dummy, though I certainly don't agree with his politics. I think Chomsky was right about a hard-coded universal grammar (as opposed to behavioral models or earlier notions of a universal grammar), but I think determining that grammar's properties is an especially difficult proposition. Chomsky has made some lesser-known contributions in the area of linguistics (such as phonology), but your average layman isn't going to be aware of them.

"Well, one thought is that is it a lot easier to "experiment" with the latest and greatest legal theory when you are one step removed from the culture."

Yeah, Jews are far removed from American culture -- that's why they created so much of it (Levis, Hollywood, "White Christmas", "America the Beautiful", Superman, etc., etc.).

And as for the way law is practiced in Israel -- do any of you actually know anything about that, or are you just speculating? I do know that lefty lawyers there have successfully challenged the Israeli government on issues like the path of the barrier the government is building with the ostensible purpose of defending Israelis from terrorists. Does that count as experimenting?

"Beats teaching your kids to resent those who do well in school, no? You might as well adopt a black kid if you are going to do that.

-anon"

LOL

Are you the same one who called Chomsky a genius? Didn't he, a man at the very top of academia, complain about anti-Semitism in schools, which kept Jews from being properly represented at 2,000% over their population proportion of top law professors?

If resentment works for super-brilliant-genius Chomsky, it should be OK for my family too, no? In fact, maybe moaning and complaining about "discrimination" or "anti-Semitism" does a bit more for your academic career than true intellectual ability. Maybe the "merit" in today's meritocracy means "kvetch", eh?

Come on. The LSAT can't be that hard or there wouldn't be so many law students at all those no name law schools. I imagine the other 50% of the admission process (assuming this information is accurate) relies heavily on grades and the quality of the undergraduate institution you attended.

BTW, Bill comes across as very bright for someone who didn't like school. I bet he does very well on standardized tests.

"If resentment works for super-brilliant-genius Chomsky, it should be OK for my family too, no?"

It's your family, so feel free to embrace resentment and otherwise follow Noam Chomsky as a role model if you want to. Personally, I couldn't care less what Noam Chomsky says. I think my earlier suggestions about investing in your kids make more sense, but that's just me.

Let us know how your strategy of resentment + setting low expectations for your kids + sharing with them your negative attitude towards school + inculcating them with victim mentality works out.

Forgive me for even questioning the thesis, but what does the number of citations have to do with anything - especially if one considers the legal culture itself out-of-whack? Law, after all, is not science.

And is it silly to ask how the US did before we had large numbers of Jews? From all the data it appears we were doing quite fine economically, culturally, scientifically, politically, and in every other way. So are Jews actually filling a need in the US, or are they simply dominating in fields that would otherwise be ably filled by non-Jews?

"Are you the same one who called Chomsky a genius? Didn't he, a man at the very top of academia, complain about anti-Semitism in schools, which kept Jews from being properly represented at 2,000% over their population proportion of top law professors?"

You may have misread my post. Chomsky is one of the only Jewish intellectuals I know of who explictly denies that anti-Semitism is a meaningful issue in contemporary America.

He says that 50+ years ago it was around to an extent but that it is no longer a serious matter.

"And is it silly to ask how the US did before we had large numbers of Jews? From all the data it appears we were doing quite fine economically, culturally, scientifically, politically, and in every other way."

Most Americans weren't doing "quite fine" in the time frame you are referring to (mid-late 19th Century at the latest). Life expectancy was thirty years less than today. Company-hired goons and National Guardsmen would literally beat workers into submission when they protested working conditions. The economy went through worse busts than the Great Depression. Medical care was half-quackery.

"So are Jews actually filling a need in the US, or are they simply dominating in fields that would otherwise be ably filled by non-Jews?"

Most countries without Jews manage to fill their professional jobs, so I think it's fair to say that if the U.S. suddenly became judenrein non-Jews would step-up to fill jobs vacated by Jews. To the extent that America is, for the most part, a meritocracy, it would seem that if you wiped out a significant percentage of top professionals of any ethnic background, Jews or otherwise, you'd get less-able replacements coming off the bench (because if they were as able, they'd already be in those positions).

Even if we lost all of our Jews today though, we'd still benefit from the seminal contributions of earlier American Jews in science, medicine, finance, culture, law, etc.

Most Americans weren't doing "quite fine" in the time frame you are referring to (mid-late 19th Century at the latest). Life expectancy was thirty years less than today. Company-hired goons and National Guardsmen would literally beat workers into submission when they protested working conditions. The economy went through worse busts than the Great Depression. Medical care was half-quackery.

Makes you wonder why millions of people bothered to cross the Atlantic to come here.

Maybe because life expectancy was low everywhere in the world at that time. And as bad as working and living conditions were in the US they were still better, on average, than elsewhere.

It makes no sense to seemingly imply that all-or even most- progress in public health, medical care, and working conditions since the late 19th century can be attributed to Jews.

For a broad overview of changes in life expectancy, fertilty and living standards worldwide over the last century see: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/140

I would actually say that it's more than 50%. The usual read on it is that the quantitative side of law school admissions is 70% LSAT/30% UGPA, but UGPA is largely fungible if you had a difficult undergrad major - a 3.0 in mech eng wold probably be very quietly considered 'better' than a 4.0 in women's studies. I would imagine that top schools (T14 - like Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Berkeley, Michigan, Duke, Virginia, NW, Cornell, Georgetown) care far more about the LSAT than about UGPA. At lower-ranked schools, UGPA is a proxy for functionality and work ethic, but from the perspective of the T14, those matter less than, well, brains.

I'm a recent immigrant and my professional record in the USA is all but nil. Basically I'm nobody. I didn't take the SAT at all, much less go to a 'good college.' But I scored in the top 300 or so in this summer's LSAT. I already have 2008-term recruitment letters from a dozen schools, including Duke, and it's not even the middle of July '07. Some TTT (tier 3 toilets) are offering me September admission.

The LSAT isn't just an IQ test. Even if you're really bright, you have to study a bit to be able to cope with the language tangles and time-budgeting problems that the test is designed to induce. I probably would have scored a 165 cold, and that's not good enough for eg Yale. (Yale takes about 170 as its 25th percentile, 176 as its 75th, which is to say you have to score in the national 98th to be considered at Yale.)

I agree with the poster who commented that Yale, Hahvahd, Stan, and Chicago produce more academics than everyone else put together. In fact, Yale has a startling 38% clerkship placement rate, last I read, which is just absurd. At Penn it's more like 6%.

As for working in 'big law,' highly remunerative corporate practice, you have to go to a T14. If you graduate #1 somewhere else, you might have a shot, but it would pretty much have to be #1. Even then, it could hold you back.

re: general Jewish topics

In Hungary, before the 2nd world war, half the doctors and lawyers in the country were Jews. Don't look now, but that's exactly where America is headed too. In my experience, the real difference between Jews and others is that Jews very rarely regress to the peasant/laborer class, regardless of whether they're smart or dumb. In the long term, that means that they rise in society. Some of them do regress - in fact, I know a family like that - but those ones tend to lose their Jewish identities.

It was the Industrial Revolution that brought about the changes that gave the world higher life expectancy and living standards. It was largely the creation of British gentiles. The opening stages of industrialism were brutal, but you can see the same condtions replicated in rapidly industrializing China today.

The economy went through worse busts than the Great Depression.

Then why did they call it the "Great" Depression? BTW, it now seems close to CW among economists that FDR's policies prolonged the Great Depression.

"Makes you wonder why millions of people bothered to cross the Atlantic to come here."

Obviously, 19th century immigrants to America (and to other countries, e.g., Brazil and Argentina) were looking for better opportunities and quality of life than they had at home. That doesn't mean that they all found that here. Many Scandinavians, for example, were essentially duped into moving to inhospitable places like the Montana desert, after being told the land would be good for farming.

"It makes no sense to seemingly imply that all-or even most- progress in public health, medical care, and working conditions since the late 19th century can be attributed to Jews."

I didn't imply anything of the sort -- and why would you expect that "all-or even most-progress in public health, medical care, and working conditions since the late 19th century" would be attributable to Jews when they make up perhaps 2% of America's population? Seemingly, you are trying to set the bar unrealistically high so as to minimize any contributions, however significant, made by American Jews to the welfare of their fellow Americans.

I mentioned the poor life expectancy, working conditions, etc. of 19th century America in response to the original poster's ignorant whitewashing of conditions in America back then. Many Jew-obsessed proles don't realize how much harsher things were for the poor and working class in the old days, when there were few Jews in America to blame things on.

"Then why did they call it the "Great" Depression?"

Because, for one thing, due to the increase in America's population since the 19th Century, the Great Depression affected more people than similar-or-worse calamities during the 19th Century; for another, the Great Depression had new media such as radio and film to document it and increase its cultural impact.

On the Great Depression vs´previouspanics/depressions: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whitten.panic.1893(...)One way to measure the severity of the depression is to examine the unemployment rate. Table 1 provides estimates of unemployment, which are derived from data on output -- annual unemployment was not directly measured until 1929, so there is no consensus on the precise magnitude of the unemployment rate of the 1890s. Despite the differences in the two series, however, it is obvious that the Depression of 1893 was an important event. The unemployment rate exceeded ten percent for five or six consecutive years. The only other time this occurred in the history of the US economy was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.(...)

Looks like no Muslims in the list. I was looking for Muslims in the list of South Asians but could not find any. I could only find Hindus in that list. Maybe the Muslims are all busy consulting on Sharia Law.

Volokh should look into that next to see what percentage of people are experts in Sharia Law and what religion they belong to

Obviously, 19th century immigrants to America (and to other countries, e.g., Brazil and Argentina) were looking for better opportunities and quality of life than they had at home. That doesn't mean that they all found that here.

Irrelevant. The standard of living for Americans has been higher than that in most of rest of the world since colonial times.

Poor quality immigrants with unrealistic expectations will always come, if we let them.

Many Scandinavians, for example, were essentially duped into moving to inhospitable places like the Montana desert, after being told the land would be good for farming.

Citation, please. "Many"? The vast majority of Scandinavians who went into agriculture settled in areas with plenty of fertile land (the Upper Midwest and California).

I didn't imply anything of the sort -- and why would you expect that "all-or even most-progress in public health, medical care, and working conditions since the late 19th century" would be attributable to Jews when they make up perhaps 2% of America's population?

That's exactly what you seemed to be implying, to this observer.

Do you also attribute the rise in standard of living in Scandinavia to Jews?

Seemingly, you are trying to set the bar unrealistically high so as to minimize any contributions, however significant, made by American Jews to the welfare of their fellow Americans.

So if we should all be down on our knees crediting Jews as a group for positive contributions by Jews, what about the negatives? Do you take responsibility for Franz Boas, Lazar Kaganovich, the 1965 immigration act, etc.?

I mentioned the poor life expectancy, working conditions, etc. of 19th century America in response to the original poster's ignorant whitewashing of conditions in America back then. Many Jew-obsessed proles don't realize how much harsher things were for the poor and working class in the old days, when there were few Jews in America to blame things on.

Again, you're implying a connection between Jews and an improved standard of living.

And who are these "Jew-obsessed proles" you refer to?

You have cited no specific Jewish contributions. In any event, it seems incredibly likely most Jewish discoveries (blue jeans and polio vaccine?) would have been made anyway, had there been no Jews in the West.

But it's not at all clear Jews could have made these contributions outside the context of European and American civilization.

If we're going to get into who owes who, I think it's obvious which group owes a bigger debt.

Most countries without Jews manage to fill their professional jobs, so I think it's fair to say that if the U.S. suddenly became judenrein non-Jews would step-up to fill jobs vacated by Jews. To the extent that America is, for the most part, a meritocracy, it would seem that if you wiped out a significant percentage of top professionals of any ethnic background, Jews or otherwise, you'd get less-able replacements coming off the bench (because if they were as able, they'd already be in those positions).

Sure: "to the extent America is a meritocracy". If you think a "meritocracy" would produce a list of "top young law professors" containing several "critical race theorists", well . . .

You think politics and ethnocentrism play no role in business and academia?

And even if Jewish professionals are objectively among the most productive/intelligent, if they are actively hostile to the founding American culture (which does not consist of Superman, Hollywood, and Levis, by the way) it is not at all obvious they have been a net benefit for America.

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